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Why Warren Won’t Run

Love her or hate her, Elizabeth Warren knows exactly who she is. When she took tennis lessons years ago, Warren hit so many balls over fences, hedges and buildings that her instructor—now her husband—considered her his worst student ever. “Once I had a weapon in my hand, I gave it everything I had,” she explained in her autobiography.

Today, the Massachusetts senator is deploying seemingly every political weapon at her disposal in defense of the middle class—and, in typical fashion, giving it everything she’s got. Aggressive, intense, single-minded—she is all of these, and that’s why she’s considered such a formidable advocate for families trying to survive on what she calls “the ragged edge.” But for all the same reasons, Warren would be miscast in the roles of presidential contender and president—and why would liberals want her to take that road, anyway? Warren’s attention would be diverted in a thousand different directions by a campaign. If she somehow managed to dethrone Hillary Clinton and win the White House, say good-bye to public dressings-down of Wall Street executives at Senate hearings and—most likely—to no-holds-barred attacks on “sleazy lobbyists,” “cowardly politicians” and banks that cheat families.

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Being president, or even just running for president, would dilute what the left loves best about Warren and also, perhaps, what the nation needs most from her. Being speculated about as a candidate for president, on the other hand, sometimes can be useful. Back in 1991, Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia told me he did not discourage speculation about a run for president because he was thrilled by the attention it generated for his ideas on health policy. So it is with Warren. She remains vastly influential as long as she retains her unique role in the national conversation. But if she actually were to run, all that would change. And her record so far suggests she knows it.

Warren often seems exasperated by all the presidential talk—and at the end of 2013, she pledged to serve out her Senate term—but more recently she has been playing a minimalist version of the speculation game. She is sounding less certain about what’s ahead, and she consistently uses the present tense in her repeated denials of interest, conspicuously avoiding a Shermanesque vow never, ever to run or serve.

Even these slight openings have been succor for the draft-Warren movement launched last month by MoveOn.org and Democracy for America. Giving the keynote this week at the AFL-CIO’s first National Summit on Wages, Warren also sounded like she was consciously leading a national movement, repeatedly declaring “what we believe” is needed to take back the economy from politicians who “made deliberate choices that favored those with money and power.”

Yet if one looks more closely at what Warren is doing than what she is saying, very little of it suggests that she is thinking about the presidency at all. She has doubled down on her longtime causes instead of broadening her portfolio in ways that are typical preparation for a presidential run. Her rhetoric, meanwhile, is as sharp and confrontational as ever. Congress should have “broken you into pieces,” Warren said of Citigroup recently on the Senate floor. In one of her final fundraising emails of 2014, she vowed to continue her fight for “accountability and a level playing field so nobody steals your purse on Main Street, or your pension on Wall Street.”

She is also 65 years old, and if it’s not going to happen now, it may be never.

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Warren’s rise from obscure law professor into fiery national advocate for the disadvantaged has hardly been an accident, and her background says a lot about where her passions lie now. The Oklahoma native spent most of her professional life teaching at Harvard Law School but says she grew up “ hanging on to the edge of the middle class by my fingernails” after her father had a heart attack and lost his job. Her parents lost their car and almost lost their house. As a young law professor, Warren did pioneering research on bankruptcy and discovered that its chief victims were families in crisis over an illness, a divorce or a lost job—families just like her own.

Thus was born her career as the nemesis of a financial system that she viewed even before the 2008 Wall Street collapse as complicit in a “rigged” system that fostered debt, foreclosures, bankruptcy and other ways to ruin low- and middle-income Americans. It was a straight line from there to her 2009 role overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program (aka the bank bailout) and, in 2010, setting up the new federal agency that was her brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Republicans, corporate America and even some Democrats were so alarmed by the prospect of Warren actually running the bureau that Obama chose someone else as its permanent director. But Warren turned the rejection into an improbable Senate victory in Massachusetts in 2012.

What she did when she arrived was telling. She joined three committees that are platforms for fighting Wall Street and income inequality: the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs; the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions; and the Special Committee on Aging (she’s adding Energy and Natural Resources this year). “She seems to be advertising her depth, not her breadth,” said one past and potentially future adviser to Clinton.

That’s a huge contrast to White House prospects past and present. As a new senator in 2005, Barack Obama joined the Foreign Relations and Homeland Security committees. Republicans Marco Rubio and Rand Paul are on the Foreign Relations and Intelligence panels. Ted Cruz is on Armed Services, as was Clinton during her Senate tenure. All have used the Senate to educate themselves on issues that face commanders in chief. If Warren suddenly turned up on one of those committees, we might wonder about her stated indifference to a White House campaign. But she hasn’t—suggesting she might understand herself and her place in national politics better than some of her fans do.

Consider a typical December day for President Obama. He talked to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe about his reelection and to Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott about the coffee-shop hostage tragedy in Sydney. He appeared in the Cabinet Room to announce a dramatic shift in Cuba policy. He issued a list of commutations and pardons. He gave remarks at two back-to-back Hanukkah receptions at the White House. And that’s only what was evident from a public schedule and press notifications.

Warren obviously studies up and votes on diverse issues in Congress and handles the full range of concerns of her Massachusetts constituents. She’s no doubt perfectly capable of developing expertise on anything that might face a president. But would she want to, and would that be the best way for her to serve? Right now she is the public figure most identified with trying to make Washington work for ordinary Americans. It’s hard to think of anyone else who could match her record of getting both headlines and results.

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This article is adapted from a case study commissioned by the Brookings Institution as part of its Profiles In Negotiation project. The full Brookings paper on the veterans deal is available here. Jill Lawrence is a columnist for Creators Syndicate and a contributing editor to U.S. News & World Report.